


Pattern of Behaviour

by xavierdolls



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Heavy Angst, Self-Harm, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-12
Updated: 2017-11-27
Packaged: 2018-12-26 21:57:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12067767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xavierdolls/pseuds/xavierdolls
Summary: Lena Luthor just can't stop trying to kill herself.[Yes, it's back.]





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The prodigal fic returns. I know I said I would re-up the whole thing at once, but uuhh.....
> 
> Anyway I forgot what my description was so hence the shitty summary! But y'all know what this fic is about.
> 
> If you wanna support me, check out my [tumblr](https://snvrs.tumblr.com) !

Lena is thirteen the first time she tries to kill herself.  _Tries,_ being the operative word. And not even a very good try at that. She is smart for her age (technically, at least), but that doesn’t extend to a practical intelligence. Not yet. Lena doesn’t really have common sense, and she won’t for a couple of more years.

She doesn’t really understand much about how to die. All she has is what she’s read and seen on TV, and general titbits she’s absorbed from the pop culture zeitgeist.

She knows that people kill themselves, and she had a vague idea of the methods involved. She just doesn’t really know  _how._

So she does as a Luthor is want to do. She researches.

It doesn’t take long for Lena to settle on an overdose as her preferred method. Everything else would make too much of a mess. Lena is not messy.

Next comes the math. She looks up the LD 50 for aspirin, having learnt the meaning of the team only a few weeks ago, when Lionel has explained to her about the efficacy of poison and how they measured it by killing mice. She took the measure by pound and multiplied it by her own weight, and divided that by how many milligrams of the active ingredient were in the average capsule of aspirin, and came up with the final number of exactly how many pills would be necessary to give herself a fifty percent chance of surviving. Twenty-seven pills.

Well, twenty-seven point six nine, but who was counting.

Lena rounds it up to twenty-eight, and waits for a few minutes to make sure the house it empty. It is. It always is. Lionel and Lillian are always busy in their respective studies, and Lex is spending so much time locked away in his room lately that Lena feels like she hasn’t seen him in a week.

Only the staff really move around the mansion, and at this hour, most of them have gone home anyway.

Lena tiptoes out of her room and finds the nearest bathroom. Finds the medicine cabinet, jumps up on the sink so she can look into it properly and takes out the packet she’s looking for. She holds it tightly in her hand and walks quickly back to her room, swinging by the kitchen on the way to grab a glass of water.

Once the door is shut behind her, she opens the packet and pulls out the foil sheets. She counts the pills. There are twenty-five. The rest have been used.

That’ll have to be enough.

She takes the first fifteen with water, until her cup is empty, and then she dry swallows the rest of them. It’s a little hard to do, and she almost vomits, her gag reflex set on edge.

She drops the packet in the trash when she’s done, and goes to lie down on her bed.

It takes ten minutes to kick in. When it does, Lena’s back in the bathroom, bent at the waist, throwing up. She can see some of the pills, still undigested, in the toilet bowl.

As soon as she steps out into the corridor, a staff member is at her side and asking what’s wrong.

“I just have a headache,” Lena says, and the staff members nods with professional worry before leading her to the kitchen. She pours Lena another glass of water and sets it in front of her.

“Would you like an aspirin?” the woman asks, turning around with a packet in hand.

Lena almost laughs.

_Almost._

The next time, she knows aspirin is off the table. After that night - the headache, the sweating, the not being able to sleep, the waking in a daze and feeling like she was never going to feel okay again – after all of that, the smell of it makes her feel sick.

It’s something about neural pathways. She’d learnt a bit about them in school, how a bad experience can rewrite your brain to have a particular aversion, like how people who get attacked by dogs are scared of them forever. Lena knows she’ll never be able to take aspirin again in her life. The next time she sees the family physician, she tells him it's an allergy, just so she’ll never have to deal with it again.

She's done her research in the year that's passed since her last attempt. She's older now, smarter. More resourceful. More _determined._ She's still decided against anything too messy, but she's moved away from pills.

You'd be surprised what kinds of poisons a fourteen-year-old could get her hands on. Especially when that fourteen-year-old was a Luthor, even if it was by little more than name.

She knows the stereotype. That poison is a woman's weapon. For as much as Lena despises assertions on how women should act (women can kill themselves just _as violently_ as men, she thinks, thank you _very much_ ) when she screws the lid off the bottle and the smell hits her hard, she can't bring herself to care.

There's a label with a skull on it, printed all in black and red, very clearly marking it out as poison. It was supposed to scare people off, but for Lena, it just confirms in herself that she chose the right method.

It smells...well, it smells like alcohol. Lena supposes that's to be expected. But there's something else too, sweeter. Sharper, too. Something that promises Lena getting it all down won't be as easy as she wishes it might be.

Well, no other way to find out.

Lena pinches her nose (taste is 90% smell, after all) and tips the bottle up sharply. She swallows once, twice, and rips the bottle away sending half a mouth full dripping down her mouth and onto her shirt. She drops the bottle, too, and it starts to leak out onto her carpet.

“Shit,” she says, and quickly picks it back up before too much of it empties out.

Her hands shake as she lifts the bottle again. It’s disgusting,  _God,_ it  _tastes_ like poison, but Lena has to keep going. She takes three more gulps, equal to maybe three centimetres gone from the water level in the bottle, and that’s it, she’s done. Her throat hurts, her stomach is starting to burn

She drops the bottle, and falls to the floor. She groans without realising it, and soon there’s a maid at her door, asking if she’s okay. She tries to stutter out a reply, but she either takes too long or sounds too fake, because the maid uses her emergency key on Lena’s door and barges in a second later.

She recoils, smelling the alcohol, and then sees Lena with the tears in her eyes and the mess on her shirt. She calls an ambulance.

In the hospital, Lena is alone. The ambulance staff lead her through to the emergency room by herself, and she spends an hour talking to various doctors and nurses and getting her blood taken before anyone will tell her what’s going on.

Lena isn’t afraid, really, but it _is_ three am and she _is_ confused, and she’s wondering where her family is, and her insides feel like they’re on fire and when her vision starts to fade, _yeah_ , okay, actually, Lena is afraid.

She stays blind for seven hours.

The doctor, her primary doctor, she assumes, gives her ethanol. He says it neutralises the methanol, that since she got here so quickly he should be able to save her vision. She never sees his face, because he’s been assigned to another patient by the time she can see again, but his voice sounds kind.

She’s sees two different psychologists before she’s allowed to see her family. They ask her about many things, and she either lies or stays silent for most of it. Eventually they bring her mother in, and Lena can’t look her in the eye. Lillian has a conversation with one of the psychologists about getting Lena into ongoing care, and they exchange contact information, vowing to talk soon.

Lillian takes her by the arm and leads her out of the interview room. It’s only when they’re out of sight that the grip becomes tighter. Bruising.

///

It occurs to her at sixteen that this isn't normal.

She watches her friends, the people who hang out with her because she can afford to buy them all concert tickets and cabs and score fake IDs, and sees how they act. They smile and it reaches their eyes. They walk around without their shoulders slumped. They make plans without wondering if they'll be able to get out of bed that day. They fall in love. They look happy.

Lena doesn't think any of them have tried to kill themselves. Not even  _once._

That’s a strange thought for Lena to handle. To think that there are people, millions of them. Billions, actually, who walk through the day without wanting to die. Who don’t even think about killing themselves. Much less fantasize.

Lena can’t really fathom that.

She knows, logically, that there are people who go their  _whole lives_ without once attempting suicide, but it sounds fake. In her mind, it feels something like a rite of passage.

There’s a presentation in school. A guest speaker talking about depression and anxiety, and how it affects high school students. When the speaker confesses, an a sad but somewhat inspirational tone, that she once attempted suicide, a hush goes through the entire room. People whisper to each other. The entire crowd is on edge for a moment.

Everyone else seems somewhere between surprised and appalled.

Lena doesn’t even look up from her notebook.

When the presentation finishes, Lena looks back at the presenter. She thinks about what she said, that suicide was selfish, that it was a permanent solution to a temporary problem, that survivors always regret their attempts, and Lena thinks,  _bullshit._ Because she  _has_ survived. And she  _doesn’t_  regret it. And you know what? She’s gonna try again, tonight. Out of spite, if nothing else.

///

The medication helps, a little bit. Maybe not in the way it’s supposed to. Maybe not entirely. It doesn’t do much for the emptiness she feels, but it helps her get out of bed. Makes it easy, even, since she can’t sleep. Lena used to go to bed at ten and sleep till nine and still take naps in the morning, and now her body won’t let her, even if she tries. She tosses and turns at night, and wakes up four or five times, and gets up at four each morning because she knowing trying to sleep any more is pointless.

So, she tries to be productive.

Lena ends up spending a lot of time in the lab. That’s where she feels she gets the most work done. And she  _does_ get work done, her research there earns her a ten thousand dollar grant at the ripe bold age of eighteen. It’s nothing compared to the Luthor fortune, but this is different, this is  _hers,_   _exclusively._ This is something she  _earned._ Lena lets herself be proud, and for a few months she feels like this might actually be possible. Maybe with this new medication, and the therapy she’s been court mandated to go to on penalty of inpatient care as the alternative, she can actually manage. Do something. Function as an adult.

 _Cope_.

That goal feels a little more out of reach after a lonely Friday night when she finishes five weeks of antidepressant with half a bottle of red lifted from the expansive wine cellar.

It ends up actually quite hard to overdose on her particular brand, Lena later finds out, so she didn’t end up doing any real permanent damage to herself. Not that her kidneys hadn’t already taken enough of a hit.

She does, however, stay awake for four days, crying at night because all she wanted to do was  _sleep,_ to just stop  _thinking_ just for a few hours. At the end of the fourth day, when she finally does get to sleep, it’s with the assistance of tablets she’d picked up from the pharmacy when she last refilled her prescription.

Lena thinks about how quickly they put her to sleep, how she just drifted off entirely, and slept like the dead for twelve hours straight.

Lena counts the number of remaining pills, and stuffs the box in the back of her drawer.

///

The sleeping pills hadn’t worked. It was the closest she’d come, maybe. Probably. She’d been taken to hospital and induced into a coma for four days. But they still hadn’t worked. Lena was still among the living, still with the same family and the same problems. All that had changed was that Lena as created, as Lillian has put it “One almighty headache for the family.”

Lillian hadn’t said much after that.

Lionel had said even less. To his credit, though, as soon as she became conscious again he wrapped her in a tight hug. She couldn’t hear him crying, but she could feel it in the way his body moved.

The couldn’t keep the secret from Lex anymore, either. Up until then they’d explained away his sister's emergency room visits as gastro bugs or quick onset infections. But he was a smart kid, and he figured it out before her parents even spoke to him.

And now Lena was hooked up to machines at seven different points, monitoring her heart, breathing, and brain activity. Lillian waits by her bed side for the socially acceptable minimum, before she leaves with the excuse that she’s going to ‘handle the press’.

Lionel stays for a bit longer, but he is an old man, and he is tired. Lena sends him away to get coffee and hopes he does more than that.

Lex is the only one left in the room. For minutes it’s just the two of them and the machines, the sounding filling up the private hospital room before soaking into the linoleum.

Lex pushes his chair closer.

“Why did you do this?” he asks, and he sees Lena’s heart rate jump at the question.

“I don’t know,” Lena says, and that’s as honest as she can afford to get.

Lex nods.

“Will you do it again?” he asks, and Lena checks the room again even though she knows very well it is empty.

“I don’t know,” she says again, and this time, it’s not honest at all.


	2. Chapter 2

The lights of National City are one of Lena’s favourite things about her office. At night, and she often stays in her office very late into it, they shimmer in the distance and give the the buildings the slight appearance of movement. Like a great glittery beast taking shallow breaths, all concrete and angles and gold dust.

She always supposed she’d end up somewhere like this. The exact city didn’t matter, nor the name of the company, be it Luthor Corp or L Corp, or even if she’d chosen to defect and attach herself as the CEO of a company entirely unrelated to her family business. Lena always expected to be destined for a penthouse office, but she is glad it was this one, in this city. She’s seen the lights in Shanghai and New York and Berlin and a million places in between, from just as high as she is now, and they just don’t look the same.

Lena keeps on getting distracted from the reports on her desk. She can’t focus, the words seeming to blur on the page before they reach her eyes. She keeps looking back over her shoulder, at the open door there onto her balcony, and she thinks about the visitor that came in that way not three days ago.

Supergirl is certainly one thing Lena wasn’t expecting.

She’d come in, and said all those things, those things about Lena’s mother. Things she didn’t want to hear. Things she knew were true.

Lena’s plan had worked. She’d stroked her mother’s ego just enough to gain her trust, and then spun around and stabbed her in the back. She knows it was necessary, it had to be done. She had no other choice. And she knew there wasn’t much to betray in the first place.

Still, now her mother and brother are in prison and her father is dead, and as Lena steps away from her desk and looks over the sleeping luminescent beast of the city, she realises that she is completely alone.

Lena glances at the date on her watch and starts to do the math in her head. She counts the weeks backwards until she reaches the fifth of July.

Roughly four months from her last attempt.

Lena pages her assistant, and tells her to call her a car. She packs up her things and makes her way to the elevator, coat folded over her arm, her mind already in her bathroom, thinking about opening the cabinet, trying to remember what’s inside it. Not aspirin, that’s for sure. But they’re be something else.

She steps through the sliding doors and presses the button for the ground floor. It’s so late that no one else is leaving, and she rides down by herself.

Lena gets in the car waiting for her. She tells the driver to take her home.

She was feeling overdue.

Lena doesn't like her apartment.

There’s nothing not to like, really. The real estate agent had very enthusiastically talked out all it’s benefits, it’s size, the view, how he had offers from a pair of Chinese business and that Lena would have to move quick if she wanted it. Lena supposed that might have been a bluff, but it didn’t matter. She chose that apartment largely for its proximity to L Corp, her real home. She spends three times more time there than she did here, basically only returning home for the few hours she sleeps. That particular side effect of the antidepressants has never worn off.

Lena drapes her coat over the back of her couch. She knows she should hang it up, that it’ll get a big crease right along the centre if she doesn’t, but...well, future creases in expensive coats aren’t exactly important anymore, are they?

She moves to the kitchen and pours herself a big, full glass of wine, thinking back to that time almost ten years ago when she’d been hospitalized for the first time. She remembers her doctors voice in her ear, moving around her, checking machines at her left and right,  _saying it’s alright, this will help, you got here very fast, you’re lucky._ Lena wishes she had been able to see his face. Even once.

He saved her life. More importantly, he saved her vision. Lena would rather be dead than be blind. Well, Lena would rather be dead than a lot of things. Maybe she’d just rather be dead, in general.

She finished the glass and pours herself another, not quite as full, and moves to her bedroom. It’s all made up, neat in black and grey and red, but it seems somewhat unreal. Like a hotel room in a movie. It hardly looks lived in, no tables on the bedside, no pictures on the wall. Lena guesses her whole apartment looks that way, the only sign of recent inhabitants being the products in the fridge that haven’t gone off yet.

Lena walks through her bedroom to her ensuite, and opens the medicine cabinet. When she turns she can see her reflection in the mirror. Makeup clean and attractive, hair neat, blouse pricey, an image of a woman who does it all. She forces her eyes off of the mirror, but can’t forget the way it makes her feel like a liar.

She’s a goddamn  _adult_ now. She  _runs_ her own company. She has an apartment, her own apartment, and a really nice one at that. She pays her bills and has meetings and is directly responsible for the employment of several hundred people under her.

And Lena still  _can’t stop herself._

Lena finds extra strength sleeping pills and pulls the packet out. She’d built up a resistance over time, and has gradually been increasing her dosage, so she knows overdosing successfully will be just that much harder.

Not impossible, though.

She takes the packet with her into the bedroom, and sits on her bed with the glass of mine she left on the bedside table.

So long as she allows herself this, Lena figures, she can be good the rest of the time.

She can be strong. Capable, put together, ruthless in the boardroom and composed out of it. She can do everything she needs to do, be everything she needs to be, so long as every few months she lets herself break open, a tidal wave rushing over her brain, pulling it under the surface like a doomed ship.

She takes the first pill, and a full gulp of wine follows.

Another pill, another gulp.

She keeps going like that, sitting straight up on the bed, years of practicing posture kicking in, dipping her hand into the box and then to her mouth, and repeating it again and again.

She gets to eleven pills, and stops. The glass is empty, and though she can dry swallow, she sees no reason too. Not when the bottle is still open in her kitchen. Lena picks up her glass and takes it with her to the kitchen. She refills her glass, and brings it up for a moment, just intending to smell it.

From her kitchen, she looks through her balcony doors and over the city. It’s from a different angle than it is from L Corp. The opposite angle, actually. She can see the building from here, and imagines the two hers, the one here and the one at L Corp, looking out at the same lights, in each other’s direction.

Lena gets an idea.

She put the glass down on the counter. When she steps out of the kitchen, her body turning, she knocks it over with her elbow and it topples over, first onto the counter, spilling all it’s contents, and then rolling off and onto the floor and shattering on the floor.

Lena doesn’t flinch. Her reflexes don’t seem to be working right, or maybe she’s just overpowering them, because she watches the glass fall and doesn’t even think about reaching for it. Just let’s it happen.

She looks back to the balcony, and Lena is suddenly much less concerned about making a mess.

Fuck the pills. Lena is getting it  _done_.

Her legs are wobbly with the wine and the exhaustion but she makes it to the balcony door and pushes it open, the wind immediately there, on her face, cold and biting. She steps out onto the balcony, leaving the door open.

There’s nothing out there but a couple of plants she’s never watered. They haven’t died yet, though, so her housekeeper must be doing it for her. There’s a bench built into the western wall, and Lena can use it to steps up to the railing, step over it, onto the ledge.

She slips her heels off and leaves them there, on the concrete. It’s rough on her feet as she walks over to the edge.

She gets on the step, and a gust of wind so strong it nearly knocks her over right then. Now that would've pissed her off. Even though she's doing this to die, Lena still wants it to exactly how and when she wants it to be. No one can take that control from her.

She just stays on that step for a while, not ready to move up to the ledge. She thinks about her family, about Lex and Lillian still in prison. Lena wonders if the prison will let them out, give them leave to go to her funeral.

 _Her funeral._ Lena wonders what it will be like. She has somewhat of an idea what it will be in theory. The will she's had since she was twenty three gives a fair amount of specifics, enough that no one would have to be seriously consulted about her wishes after death. Lena is grateful for that, at least. If she didn’t plan it, she has no idea who else might.

Lena tries to imagine the crowd there. Who would come and who wouldn’t. She places her assistant there first, and a few other L Corp employees she’s fairly sure would come, but beyond that it’s...fuzzy. Lena doesn’t have many friends to speak of.

She wonders if Kara will come.

For a second, despite all of it, Lena smiles when she thinks of her. Kara’s eternally positive attitude, it just radiating off of her the second she first stepped into Lena’s office.

Then Lena thinks about Kara being in her situation, and she realises that Kara was probably one of those people who had never attempted suicide (not even  _once_ ), and she gets bitter all over again.

Lena takes the next step, one foot on the cement half wall barrier.

She doesn’t hear the voice from her apartment as she takes her other foot up, too.

And then Lena is standing on the edge, barefoot, wine spilt in the kitchen, half empty bottle of sleeping pills in her bedroom. That’s the situation Kara finds her in.

“Lena?” the sunshine tinged voice reached Lena despite the wind fighting against it, from somewhere deeper in the apartment, somewhat where she hasn’t seen yet, or hasn’t pieced the scene together.

“I’m sorry for just letting myself in, but your door was unlocked and you weren’t t answering and I really needed to talk to-”

Lena heard the moment her voice changes. She stopped in the middle of her sentence and Lena could almost hear the cogs in Kara’s brain clink and clink and slot into place.

“ _Lena_.”

Lena hears footsteps, the door pushed open wider, and then the footsteps changing when Kara reaches the balcony. She’s so fast, Lena thinks, it’s almost superhuman.

“Lena what are you doing?” It comes out all too fast, in one breath, but Lena manages to understand it regardless.

“I think you know what I'm doing,” she says, head still straightforward, looking at the lights, speaking into the wind but knowing that Kara wouldn't have a problem hearing.

“G-God, Lena,” she can hear the fluster in Kara's voice and almost turns to look at her, to see her expression, to see that face of  _but you're Lena Luthor_ , and  _what are you doing to yourself_ and  _why._

She used to hate those looks, those questions, but first she became resistant, and then she became immune, and then she became addicted.

Lena wants to see Kara's face, she imagines the surprise there, the confusion. She wants Kara to see how much she's suffering, to know what she does, how every few months she tries to kill herself. She wants Kara to see her pain, and to  _know_ it, and she wants to see it reflected on Kara’s face right back at her, because Lena has looked at her own suffering long enough, but it's always interesting to see a different angle of it.

Or maybe she just wants to see Kara's face.

Lena knows she won't be able to jump if she doesn't take one last look. She'd regret it, anyway. So she does turn around.

And she wishes she hadn't seen Kara's face, after all.

She's crying, for starters. Her eyes are bed and when she breathes, it sounds a little wet. Her face is broken open, and  she he was pain there that Lena doesn't recognise, and doesn't want to. The creases from where she's frowning make her look about ten years older.

“Lena….” her voice breaks on the second syllable. “Please… don't do this.”

When Lena gives no response at all, Kara speaks again.

“Lena whatever it is, we can figure it out, it's not the end of the world, I promise.”

No, Lena thinks. The end of the world was three days ago, and we dealt with that already. That’s not what this is. Kara doesn’t understand. Lena tells her as much.

“Then make me understand,” she begs, inching closer like if she moves to suddenly she might frighten Lena off the edge.

“You can’t,” Lena says, “You can’t understand. You don’t have it in you to understand. You can’t understand unless you feel it yourself, and I have it in me, but you, Kara, you....” Lena tears her vision away from Kara and straight ahead again. “You don’t. You’re one of them.”

“One-one of what?” Kara asks. She’s never looked smaller in her life.

“One of the people who were made to live,” Lena spits out the words like they taste acidic in her mouth, and they kind of do.

“And you don’t think you’re one of them?”

The beast of the city takes a deep breath.

Lena is tired of this pattern. She is tired of trying, of failing every time. She knows so long as she is alive, the next attempt will always be there, always at the back of the mind. She’ll never be able to stop thinking about it, not now, not when it’s this deep in her brain it might as well be instinct.

Lena thinks that she can’t go on like this, with this hanging over her, always there.

She needs to take the option away from herself.

“Of course not,” Lena says.

And then jumps.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note that I won't reply to 'plz update!!' or 'when r u gonna update?' comments, thank you! 
> 
> You can [find me on tumblr.](http://snvrs.tumblr.com/writingcomm)


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